eSports Game Review: League of Legends

What is League of Legends

League of Legends is without a doubt the most popular esport (or electronic sport) in the world. It is a MOBA game (multiplayer online battle arena) developed and published by Riot Games. Announced in October 2008 and released just one year later, League of Legends has reached an enormous worldwide audience and is now played by over 100 million people.

How League of Legends is played

Like all MOBAs, League of Legends is a complex and challenging game, combining real-time strategy with RPG features. It requires an excellent attention span (matches last anywhere between 20 and 60 minutes), teamplay (the game is played in a 5 vs 5 format), self-control (not only because you’re dealing with people but also because losing can be a painful experience) and a solid understanding of its hundreds of champions, items and mechanics.

At its most basic level, League of Legends is played in the following way: two teams, Red and Blue, pick champions (one per player) out of a pool of 139 options at the beginning of each game. Then they proceed to do battle in a two-sided virtual arena with the objective of destroying their opponent’s Nexus (which is the main structure inside a team’s base, or the equivalent of the King in Chess).

Every champion possesses a unique set of abilities, which can be learned and upgraded as you grow in level. Three of these abilities are available at level 1, while the 4th (frequently called “the ultimate”) becomes available at level 6.

In addition to these, you also have multiple Summoner Spells such as Teleport, Flash and Smite. You can choose 2 of them for your champion at the beginning of each game.

Two final things that you can choose for your champion during the selection phase are its primary and secondary development paths. There are 5 paths to choose from: Precision, Domination, Sorcery, Resolve, and Inspiration. These in turn contain a Keystone, Rune slots, and give your champion a Trait. All of these things translate into a variety of bonuses, such as increased movement speed, damage resistance and cooldown reduction.

Champions have a number of attributes like health, attack damage, attack speed, movement speed, armor, magic resist, health regeneration, and ability power, which increase as you level up or buy different items (such as Infinity Edge, Ninja Tabi, Guardian Angel, and Nashor’s Tooth).

Champions develop just like in role-playing games, accumulating gold and experience as they kill creatures and enemies during the match. You start each time at level 1 and have very little gold to work with, and then begin to grow at a slower or faster pace.

Experience points help you to level up, while gold allows you to buy items. Each time you grow in level you gain one skill point that can be spent to learn a new available ability, or to upgrade one of the spells you already possess.

As you increase in level and buy powerful items with the gold you’ve earned, you become stronger and more able to deal with the enemy team’s lineup. Subsequently, this allows you to dictate the pace of the game, put pressure on your opponents, take away their map control and force them to fight you in order to defend their structures.

Both teams split their efforts and resources in order to defend or launch attacks on three different lanes (top, mid and bottom). Each of these lanes is a path connecting their bases, and is defended by friendly towers and creatures which spawn at regular intervals.

When a champion dies, it respawns in his team’s base after a number of seconds. This number will vary depending on the champion’s level and the number of minutes that have passed since the start of the game.

Each week, a certain number of champions can be played for free (no need to own them), thanks to the Free Champion Rotation feature. However, having a champion available for selection at all times requires you to buy it. This can be done using Riot Points (RP) or Blue Essence points (BE). Blue Essence points are gained whenever you level up your account (you do this by playing games and earning experience points). Riot Points can be bought with money. In this sense, League of Legends is not entirely free to play, even though the game itself costs nothing.

With so many unique champions to choose from and hundreds of items available for purchase, League of Legends has an enormous replay value. No two matches are ever the same. The game cannot possibly bore you and actually becomes addictive once you start to learn the basics and get good at it.

League of Legends’ professional scene

League of Legends has a well established professional scene with a lot of teams, coaches, analysts and tournaments. Official matches and events that you can watch and bet on run almost all year long.

Each season, a League of Legends World Championship (called Worlds) is organized, lasting around 6 weeks, featuring the best 24 teams in the world (coming from 13 different regions) and having a prize pool of several million dollars. In 2017, this prize pool was $4.6 million.

As you’d imagine, top teams (such as Samsung Galaxy, SK Telecom T1, Royal Never Give Up, Fnatic and Cloud9) and players (such as Faker, Bjergsen, Rekkless and Doublelift) are highly regarded by the eSports community and have millions of fans around the world.

Becoming a successful League of Legends bettor

Becoming a successful League of Legends bettor requires you to either develop a solid understanding of the game and its professional scene, or gain access to people who are already experts in this field.

Playing League of Legends, watching professional tournaments and studying the professional scene will sharpen your intuition as a League of Legends bettor and allow you make much more accurate predictions.

In addition to this, you should also develop your own betting strategy or system and incorporate sound betting tactics and principles in it. For instance, when betting on a League of Legends game, you should always watch the drafting phase before placing your bet. During this phase, teams often outdraft each other, choosing champion compositions that strongly counter their opponent’s.

League of Legends news, tournament previews and free betting tips

At esportsbookies.com, we keep you up to date with the critical events that are shaping the League of Legends community and can affect your success as a League of Legends bettor. What happened at the latest League of Legends tournament and who emerged victorious? What is the next important tournament and what is the current form of the teams that will participate in it? Has the game been patched recently? What are the latest player transfers?

In our League of Legends section, we keep you up to date with all of these things and give you quick access to the most recent and relevant information. We also offer you in depth team analyses and valuable betting tips that can greatly improve your results as a bettor.